GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet

Real Cost of Living

I have a friend who has been looking for an apartment. She's in
her early 30s, has a young son and works in the service industry at a
job that relies on tips to make ends meet. She lives with her parents
-- but not out of choice. It's because the cost of housing in our
area is well beyond her reach.

And she's not alone.

According to a recent study by the Legal Services of New Jersey's
Poverty Research Institute titled "The Real Cost of Living in 2005:
The Self-Sufficiency Standard for New Jersey," the average adult with
two kids has to earn $17.70 per hour or $37,374 a year to be
considered self-sufficient in the state.

According to PRI, the self-sufficiency standard is a better model
-- which would be $16,090 -- by which to gauge the actual cost of
living in a given area. Unlike the federal poverty line, which is
calculated nationally based on the cost of food and takes into
account nothing else, the self-sufficiency standard attempts to
calculate what families need to earn to pay for food, housing,
healthcare, childcare, transportation, clothing and the normal
incidentals that most of us take for granted.

The figures vary from region to region, depending on the cost of
various services. In Indianapolis, for instance, a family of three
would need to earn $16.25 an hour -- or $33,800 a year -- to be
self-sufficient, while in Milwaukee the cost balloons to $20.08 an
hour or $41,766 a year.

In Middlesex County, N.J., where I live, the PRI calculates
self-sufficiency for a family of three at $45,309, while a family of
four would need to earn a little more than $50,000, with the figures
rising for larger families with older children.

Let's put this in perspective: That is less than $1,000 a week to
cover rent and utilities, food, clothing, transportation and child
care.

And, yet, it is almost three times the poverty threshold set by
the federal government and, more importantly, more than four times
what someone working 40 hours a week at a minimum wage job would
earn, meaning that there is no way the federal minimum wage can keep
a family afloat economically.

Think about it. A single wage-earner making the federal minimum
wage earns $206 a week, clearing maybe $175. Two minimum-wage-earners
would clear about $350 a week, or just $1,400 a month to cover
everything. In New Jersey, the wage will be boosted to $7.15 over the
next two years, but even at that wage the prospects can look pretty
bleak. Two wage-earners would probably clear just over $480 a week,
or $1,920 a month, in a region where it's difficult to find decent
housing for less than $1,000 a month.

This is why so many people are turning to soup kitchens and other
nonprofits for help. Elijah's Promise Soup Kitchen in New Brunswick,
the county seat of Middlesex County, serves about 300 meals a day and
about 100,000 a year -- a number that is growing -- to people who
live in the region. It provides health screenings, housing and
employment assistance, HIV/AIDS and addictions counseling and other
services.

Around Christmas time, my friend told me that agencies like
Elijah's Promise were designed to provide emergency provisions, but
are now serving an even more essential service as workers are forced
to choose between food and rent, medicine and transportation.

"Volunteer-based organizations just can't keep up," she says.
"It's not an emergency anymore. We're now providing supplemental
feeding. People need that to get by."

Peter Wise, a friend who runs the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen, puts
it bluntly.

"On first thought, this is a great program," he told a reporter
at my paper (The Cranbury Press) in December. "But on second
consideration: Why is it that in 2004, in the capital city of the
wealthiest state in the wealthiest country in the world, someone who
is working a full-time job has to eat at a soup kitchen?"

You can go town by town and find the same kinds of programs
stepping in to provide the kinds of services that should be provided
by the states and federal governments.

So while the world has finally woken up to the dire conditions in
Africa -- the Live 8 concerts, while mostly an exercise in rock
star solipsism, did raise awareness of the horrors of Third World
poverty -- we need to make sure we do as much as we can to wake
Americans up to the poverty in their own backyards.

After all, how can we allow our citizens -- our neighbors and
our friends -- to live on the streets or go hungry when we live in
the wealthiest country in the history of the world?

Many of the most effective groups working on the issues of
economic need are doing so at the local level. Some can be found at
www.grass-roots.org. National groups advocating on behalf of the poor
include:

Hank Kalet is a poet and newspaper editor living in central New
Jersey. Email grassroots@comcast.net. Kalet edits The Other Half
literary magazine as part of the Voices of Reason collective, which
uses music and literature to raise money for the hungry and homeless
in central New Jersey. Voices of Reason can be found at
www.voicesofreason.com.